Driven View of Web Site Design

An Information-Driven View of Web Site Design

The goal of a successful Web initiative is to find the perfect fit between information your market wants or needs and information that supports your firm or organization’s marketing goals.

A poor Web site is one-sided. It emphasizes information solely from the business owner’s point of view. A popular Web site is one that provides information the market wants but doesn’t support the firm or organization’s marketing goals. An effective Web site, however, provides information that satisfies both the firm’s and the visitor’s goals.

There are several approaches you might take to determining your market’s information needs:

1. Intuition—provide the information you think they need.
2. Historical—base your Web site’s information on previous sales experiences.
3. Goal-driven—provide content based on your firm or organization’s marketing goals.
4. Competitor—survey your competitor’s Web sites and see what types of information they provide.
5. Analytical—base information on an analysis of Web site traffic.
6. Partnership—create a partnership with your market and let them determine the information you provide on your Web site.

These approaches can be described as “me first” or “market first.”

“Me First” Approaches
As you begin your Web site initiative, the approach you choose will probably be based on a combination of the first three alternatives.

Intuitive approach
The intuitive approach is the weakest approach of all. Interestingly enough, it’s also the most stressful and time-consuming of all because you’re forced to guess, rather than rely on more solid forms of evidence.

The intuitive approach is based on putting yourself in your prospect’s shoes and asking, “If I were a prospect in the market for the product or service I’m offering, what information would I need to make a choice?” The problem is that you—as a business owner or organization executive—know too much; you suffer from knowledge-induced myopia. What’s important to you may not be important to your prospects and customers. More important, what’s boring or common sense to you may be news to your prospects.

This is a battle that you’ll be facing throughout your Web initiative—the battle to view your Web site from the market’s point of view.

Historical approach
Another approach is to review the concerns and questions that are typically brought up during previous sales presentations and identify the issues that are important to your market. The goal is to identify the questions that you and your sales force are asked over and over again and incorporate as much of this information in your Web site your Web site as possible.

Asking questions represents the best way to do this. Typical questions include:

1. What are the three most frequently asked questions your customers ask when purchasing your product or service?
2. What other questions typically come up?
3. What are your qualifications for providing the product or service?
4. How is your firm or organization different from others providing your product or service?
5. What are the procedures involved in buying and using the product or service?
6. What are the next purchases customers frequently make, or ask about?

To the degree that you view your Web site as a sales presentation, you’ll be on the road to identifying your market’s information needs.

Goal-driven
Another approach is to identify your firm’s or organization’s marketing needs as specifically as possible. What are the goals of your Web site? Increased business and referrals is not a sufficient answer. Instead, break your business down into the categories of products or services you provide and establish goals for each category: If you’re an author and consultant, for example:

1. How many copies of each book do you want to sell direct over the Web each month to new readers?
2. How many copies of each book do you want to sell each month to readers who previously purchased other books?
3. How many requests for information about speaking engagements do you want to generate each month?
4. How many requests for information about your consulting services do you want to generate each month?

After you have identified your goals, try to identify the information that your market will need in order to accomplish these goals. For example, if you want to sell 35 books, you will probably want to include a table of contents, copies of reviews from satisfied readers, and possibly a sample chapter. Once you have established your goals, it becomes a lot easier to identify the information necessary to achieve them. Use the following worksheet as a guide to establishing realistic marketing goals.

• How many new prospects do you want to contact you each month?
• How many C-level clients do you want to upgrade to B-level clients? How many B-level clients do you want to upgrade to A-level clients?
• How many new consulting clients do you want to generate per month?
• How many books do you want to sell per month?
• How many support calls do you want to eliminate?
• How many repeat sales?

Competitor
Your Web site should never be developed in isolation from your competitor. There are several reasons you should closely monitor your competitor’s Web sites Worksheet: Marketing Goals

1. At the very least, you want to makes sure that your Web site is dramatically different from your competitor’s. If your primary competitors use red, you should use blue. If they use a serif typeface, you should consider a sans serif typeface. Your marketing communications should never be confused with your competitors.
2. A glance at your competitor’s Web site may suggest categories of information you may have overlooked.
3. In the worst case scenario, you may be forced to react to prices or promotions on your competitor’s Web site. You don’t want to appear to be more expensive or less qualified than your competitors.
4. How frequently updated? Monitoring your competitor’s Web sites will give you a clue as to how frequently you should update your Web site. If your competitor’s Web site is updated weekly, yours should to. If you don’t, you’ll be sending out a “less professional” image.

Analytical
A more advanced approach is based on monitoring the performance of your Web site. Web site traffic reports can provide you with information like:

1. How many visitors did your home page attract?
2. Which pages enjoyed the most traffic?
3. Which pages were visited first?
4. Which pages enjoyed the least traffic?
5. How long did visitors stay at each page?
6. What was the last page of your Web site visited?

This information can be invaluable. By identifying your most popular pages—pages that are frequently visited and where visitors stay a long time—you can identify the topics of greatest interest to your market. Conversely, after a short time, by identifying Web site traffic reports, you will be able to identify the topics that are of least importance to your market as evidenced by fewer and shorter visits. Then it’s simply a matter of providing more articles on topics that treat popular topics in greater detail.

There are numerous software programs available that permit you to analyze Web site traffic. If you are hosting your own Web site on your own server, you’ll have to purchase these programs and interpret the results yourself—increasing your investment, learning curve, and workload. In most cases, however, your Internet service provider already has these programs and, for an additional cost each month, can prepare reports analyzing Web site traffic on your site, identifying the most popular pages and the time spent on them.

These Web site traffic reports can also indicate the order in which pages were visited at your site. After they arrived at the home page, for example, which page was usually the first one visited? Web site traffic can also indicate the sequence of page visits; which pages are typically visited first, which pages are rarely visited—or visited last.

By analyzing Web site traffic reports, you can learn from your visitors. Instead of guessing which topics are of most importance, you can analyze your visitor’s behavior and learn from it. You can replace guesswork and hunches with information and knowledge.

Partnership
A more fruitful approach is to constantly ask your Web site visitors to evaluate your Web site’s content and be guided by their reactions. Forms represent the easiest way to do this. Forms permit Web site visitors to quickly communicate their likes and dislikes to you.

If your Web site includes a visitor registration form, a simple pair of text boxes asking “What was the most useful part of this Web site?” and “What was the least useful part of this Web site?” can provide you with valuable information.

An even better approach is to include an opportunity for visitor evaluation or feedback on each page of your Web site. Option boxes represent the best approach since they make it easy for visitors to respond. Option boxes offer visitors a choice of several mutually exclusive options (visitors can’t respond that the page was both “very useful” and “not very useful”). Added to the bottom of each page, along with a Submit and Reset buttons, option boxes don’t take up much space, and it is easy to compile the results.

A typical option box might read “How would you rate the contents of this article?”

• Very useful
• Somewhat useful
• Not very useful
• A waste of time

You can assign values to each option, for example:

• “Very useful” would be assigned the number 2
• “Somewhat useful” would be assigned the number 1
• “Not very useful” would be assigned negative 1
• “A waste of time” would be assigned negative 2

Visitor evaluations could go directly into a database on your Web site, permitting easy evaluation. There would be a separate column for each article. Negative responses would cancel positive responses, making it easy to score each article by simply adding up the responses.

Another approach would be to add a “Comment” or “Feedback” text box to the bottom of each article. Comments and feedback for each article could be directed to a different database or e-mail address. To succeed, your comment or feedback box should have a specific headline: “What other topics should have been covered in this article?” or “Does this article suggest any questions you’d like answered?”

Depending on the goals of your Web site, you could build a dialog with your Web site visitors by adding (copying and pasting) comments to the end of each article. This would dramatically show visitors that you were interested in their responses.

E-mail Strategy For Your Web Site

E-mail Strategy For Your Web Site

Since e-mail is the engine that propels your customers from step to step along the five-stage customer development cycle, it’s important that you develop an attainable, consistent, and effective e-mail strategy.

• Your e-mail strategy has to be attainable in that, once you commit to it, you can be reasonably certain that you have the resources to maintain an e-mail mailing list, can develop your messages at appropriate intervals, and have the talent necessary to write compelling e-mail.
• Your e-mail strategy has to be consistent in that success comes from predictability. An on-again/off-again e-mail strategy will alienate your customers and prospects. If you promise to send a once-a-month e-mail newsletter or bimonthly e-mail alerts, the success of your relationship marketing strategy is undermined the first time you miss your self-imposed deadline.
• Most important, your e-mail has to be effective. Unread e-mail is a waste of Web resources, your time, and the recipient’s time. Your e-mail has to be more than “brag and boast” advertising. It has to be interesting in style and relevant in content. More important, it has to be meaningful enough to motivate visitors to visit the relevant premium content areas of your Web site.

It’s important to remember that your customers and prospects are receiving more and more e-mail every day. Unless your e-mail message stands out by virtue of its brevity or extremely relevant content, it’s unlikely to be read. Your e-mail will either sit in your customer’s in-box, waiting until a later (that often never arrives) to be read or the recipients will delete your message. Worse, they may request that you remove them from your e-mail distribution list.

Using E-mail to Drive Visitors to Your Web Site
E-mail should be sent to previous Web site visitors or new prospects each time new information is posted on the Web site. The new information should be as easy to locate on the Web site as possible. Some of the ways this is done include:

• E-mail alerts inform customers when new content has been added to your Web site. You can include the URL of an unlinked page in your alert so that recipients can click on a link and go directly to the desired page.
• You can send e-mail teasers, which are a bit longer than alerts. E-mail teasers typically list the headlines for new information placed on your Web site along with a paragraph or two amplifying the headline and further describing the information that has been added. Teasers will also include the URLs of the specific pages of the Web site the new information is placed on, permitting visitors to go directly to the new content.
• Your bimonthly or monthly e-mails can function like a newsletter, telling the whole story—or enough of the story—so that visitors do not have to go back to the Web site to learn more. Although the text will be unformatted, visitors will be reminded of your constant efforts to provide meaningful information. More important, visitors may choose to forward your newsletter to friends and business associates who might benefit from the newly added content on your Web site.

Long e-mails are read if they offer the recipient compelling and relevant information. The 1to1.com e-mail newsletters sent by Peppers and Roger fall into this category. Each e-mail contains several full-length articles. Although tightly written, each e-mail contains enough information to communicate a key point.

• Another approach is the summary approach. This involves sending information that updates your customer’s or prospect’s knowledge of your Web site. One of the best examples of this is the weekly alert that E. P. Levine sends out informing camera lovers of additions to their inventory of used equipment. Summary e-mail can be read at a glance and avoids the necessity for visitors to launch their Web browser and visit the Web site itself.
• Your e-mail can also contain attached files, such as formatted word processed documents, PowerPoint presentations, or sophisticated publications created using page layout programs like Adobe PageMaker and saved using Adobe Acrobat.

Adobe Acrobat permits you to distribute fully formatted publications that appear on screen exactly as they looked when they were created and can also be printed on the recipient’s printer. Acrobat publications contain all of the formatting attributes found on a the original print version of the publication, including typefaces not available on the individual’s computer. Adobe Acrobat documents preserve all of the design nuances, such as subtle letter and line spacing, found on the original document. The Adobe Acrobat Reader has already been widely installed on computers and can be downloaded for free from the Adobe Web site. (Always provide a link to the appropriate page of the Adobe Web site for the convenience of those who may not have already downloaded Adobe Acrobat.)

There are three primary disadvantages of distributing attached documents.

1. Acrobat files take time to download and occupy valuable computer hard disk or network space.
2. Many corporations, in order to prevent the transmission of computer viruses, do not allow attached files through their firewalls or e-mail security systems.
3. Attached files do not drive e-mail recipients back to your Web site, which, after all, is the whole purpose of sending the e-mail.

Choosing the right option
Any one of the above options might be enough to guarantee success. More important than the perfection with which these options are executed is the consistency in which you implement your e-mail campaign.

A one-page e-mail “teaser” that goes out like clockwork on the first and fifteenth of each month is far better than an occasional four-page e-mail newsletter that disappears from view for months at a time. Your goal is to constantly keep your prospects and customers aware of your presence and, whenever possible, to drive visitors—and their friends and coworkers—back to your Web site for more information.

The very fact that you consistently send an e-mail teaser or e-mail newsletter to your customers and prospects reminds them of your professionalism and your commitment to providing the information they need to do their job better or enjoy their pleasures with more satisfaction. Consistency equals success.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of using information and e-mail to propel the customer development cycle. Information used to be frightfully expensive to communicate to prospects and customers. Producing, printing, and mailing postcards and newsletters can be expensive and it can take weeks—often months—for even the simplest project to get designed, produced, printed, addressed, and mailed.

All in all, the best e-mail approach combines brevity and meaningful content with one or more hyperlinks that take visitors to a specific premium content page that interests them.

FOCUS ON CURRENT CUSTOMERS FIRST!

FOCUS ON CURRENT CUSTOMERS FIRST!

Once you've got a simple Web site up and you're looking to expand it, I'd next focus on providing more information primarily for current customers. Businesses on the Web have had a lot more success serving current customers better and more efficiently than attracting new ones.

The Web can be particularly effective for many kinds of service support. You can provide information twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without having anyone on staff. And you can update information instantly.

You might be able to slash your customer-service costs dramatically by shifting customers to the Web. Consider announcing the Web address automatically to all incoming callers on your customer-service line.

For minimal cost, you could just list by category answers to frequently asked questions or solutions to common problems. Later you may want to go to the expense of having a database and search engine added.